California resident Katie Prather remembers thinking that her son, who has autism, could have mastered math skills if he had less work to complete on assignments in elementary school. By middle school, she thought he would fare better if he had more social pragmatic skills to navigate interactions with his teachers and students.
At the start of high school, she said, her son was “hanging out with the wrong crowd,” hoping to fit in after years of being called a problem child by teachers and classmates. Often he was overstimulated, “spent by the end of the school day,” and failing his classes at school even though he had an individualized education plan, which is guaranteed to students with disabilities under federal law.
That’s when Prather started to fear that the services the school district was providing him weren’t working. Even worse, she worried he wouldn’t graduate on time.
Read more at USA Today.
